


The One-Cape Town that Never Stops Burning

by intodusk



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Canon Compliant, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:00:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28035051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intodusk/pseuds/intodusk
Summary: In late September, 1997, an investigative journalist for the Sunset Gazette was sent to a sleepy farm town to follow up on some dubious rumors of cape activity. Rowan Palmer went in expecting to write a fluff piece on cryptids and campfire stories. This is the article the Gazette got instead.My contribution to the Parahuman Fanzine.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	The One-Cape Town that Never Stops Burning

**Author's Note:**

> I'm very glad I could be a part of this zine and cannot recommend my co-contributors' pieces enough. For all that, as well as a version of this piece in a much fancier format, download the Parahuman Fanzine at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VQ9T7PBrkVZ719EmiaXMA6pZgzgl1K9GTmOxsEXLgBY/viewform?edit_requested=true

When I was assigned to investigate the goings-on of August Hollow, I thought I’d been handed a paid vacation. Three days and three nights in some tiny farm town, far away from my office building, put up in a bed and breakfast on the Gazette’s dime. I figured I’d chat up the locals a bit, get a pull quote or two and call it good, because there was no way I’d find anything worth the front page.

The ‘leads’ were less than flimsy: individuals had taken photos of clouds lit up ember-orange from below, at different angles and, purportedly, on different nights. The photos circulated on an online forum as evidence of supposed cape activity. A user claimed they’d seen a figure wreathed in flames roving the country roads and the rumors took off from there. Within the week they’d collectively dubbed the cape Effigy and decided August Hollow must be its favored stomping grounds.

Very little held up to a critical probe. The pictures failed to capture so much as a wisp of rising smoke. The would-be witness offered no evidence beyond their own say-so. Not a single verified resident of the town had posted in the thread. It was pretty clear to me that there was less going on than met the eye; perhaps some jumpy suburbanites had caught glimpses of a firework and cried cape, and urban legends had helped jam together puzzle pieces that didn’t actually fit.

I explained as much to my wife, but she was less assured. “A bucket, a fire blanket, and a portable extinguisher,” she ordered, pretending to fight our dog for his treat. He tugged it from her grip and bounded away, tail wagging in triumph. She looked me in the eyes. “At minimum.”

Far be it from me to deny her.

Once I’d gotten everything packed and let her check it over, I kissed her goodbye and hit the road. For all the miles between my city and the town, the drive was a straight shot down the freeway. I took the opportunity to spin an audiobook CD.

Like most rural towns down that stretch, August Hollow was organized like a gradient between the road and the farmland beyond. Coming off the exit ramp, I was greeted with a two-pump gas station and a convenience store that kept its map racks near the front. Navigating the two blocks of proper shops and businesses I found myself among exposed, faded brick and inexpensive wood siding. Stumpy little trees just starting to go yellow decorated the sidewalks and many of the folks I saw about their business wore scarves and jackets. My destination was on the border between the commercial streets and the residentials, just before all the houses and public service offices. 

The bed and breakfast was bigger than most of the other buildings, if only for being two stories tall. It was a dull off-white with grey shingles and large windows, about as wide as it was tall. A pair of rose bushes framed the front steps, thinnest near the foot traffic. I hesitated in the entryway when I saw scorch marks all over the wooden floor, but shook it off. It was clearly a design choice; the scorching was too consistent to be anything but.

The proprietor, one Floyd Greene, was a stout, older fellow with weathered hands and kind eyes. If he thought my accoutrements strange, he didn’t react except to raise a fuzzy brow. He led me up the stairs to my room, showed me where I could stow my things, and pointed out the view from the window on the far wall. It turned out that, when the rest of the town is mostly one-story buildings and flat farmland, being two stories up gives you a pretty nice view of the fields.

That first night, tucked beneath a heavy quilt and nuzzled into a downy pillow, I slept easy.

When I ambled into the dining room the next morning, Mr. Greene had made eggs, bacon and toast. He told me he’d been a farmer when he was younger and I told him I wrote for the paper. Between bites I inquired about where I could find this, that, and the other, and he gave me simple, clear directions to each. When I thanked him and made to leave, he stopped me and asked what exactly I was here for. I leveled with him and said it was for a story, but not one I expected to find.

He seemed satisfied with that, though there was something else in the look he gave me. “Careful you don’t upset nobody,” he warned. “I know the city’s got its own kind of crazy, but folks around here aren’t used to that sort of thing. Mind the questions you ask, yeah?”

I assured him I didn’t plan on stirring up trouble, and I meant it.

My first destination was the local school. Not an uncommon way to start an investigation; schools tend to be central loci in community gossip networks. Teachers chatter with other teachers, parents gab with other parents, and kids take everything they overhear and pass it around. Most of that is overblown, speculative, or just outright false, but if you can pick the wheat from the chaff, you can pick up on a detail or two that'll help you put a story together.

The school itself was a ramshackle thing on the border between the streets and the field, a collection of portables wedged together to imitate a proper building. Kindergarteners were taught one door down from grade schoolers, and middle schoolers likewise shared their side with high schoolers.

I found one of the teachers alone during the lunch period, nibbling a tuna sandwich and supervising kids as they played in the grass. I ran through some easy questions with her, the kind you ask when you don’t know what exactly you’re fishing for, vague and open-ended. Have you seen anything you couldn’t explain, did any parents mention interesting happenings, were any of your students withdrawn under odd circumstances.

She got an uncertain squint in her eye at that last one but just shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. You don’t always end the school year with every kid you had at the start, of course. People move, or they switch to homeschooling, or... or something else happens, and your class is a little smaller after that. But nothing strange, no.”

I thanked her for her time and wandered afield, coming across a gaggle of third or fourth graders under a tree. They sat on a bed of fallen leaves, mindless of clothing stains or hidden insects. I watched one drop his granola bar on the ground, then pick it up again and take another bite.

When I introduced myself they had none of the wariness I’d come to expect from children in metropolitan areas, and when I started asking similar questions they were more than eager to share.

“He came to my mama’s farm and took an apple from our tree,” said the one with the granola bar, grinning wide.

“Nuh-uh!” retorted another, hands on her hips. “If he did, your house woulda been blowed up!”

A third mumbled as he picked a dry leaf apart, bit by bit. “You can hear him at night sometimes. But only if you listen real close.”

I wrote down their statements and took my leave, going over everything I’d gotten. The teacher hadn’t given me much but I could easily quote the kids to help sell the urban legend angle. Their accounts were a little thematically incongruous, as rural cryptids went, but in the era of real live superheroes it wasn’t unusual for imaginations to get out of hand.

On the second night, just as I was heading to bed, a low flicker in the dark caught my eye. I crept over to the window, squinting into the far fields.

Out amidst the farmland, distant enough I could barely see it, a small fire danced. It was low and dim, as fires go, but in the quiet void of rural night it was almost entrancing.

I watched it a while to determine if it was dangerous but it didn’t seem to spread or grow any. Some small part of me, the same part that had compelled ten-year-old me to hide beneath my blankets whenever the house creaked, worried it might be Effigy itself, wandering the fields in search of someone to burn. I wasn’t ten anymore, though, and I didn’t let creaky walls or country bonfires spook me. I grabbed my portable CD player, got into bed facing the wall, and fell asleep to a dulcet baritone reading me into dreams.

My second destination was a funeral home.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to one. Violent crime wasn’t my job’s focus, and on the occasion I did need to ask about a body I’d talked to one of the city’s morticians. They tended to be clinical and blunt, which suited me fine.

The funeral home was small, not much more than a display room for the caskets and a little office across from it. The office’s walls were a warm yellow-white and a soft red rug covered the hard floor. Pictures of flowers in vases hung around the room, livened by gentle light coming through gauzy curtains. A corded phone sat on one side of the varnished wooden desk, mirrored on the other side by a box of tissues. It felt as though the room was trying to comfort and console me at every turn, save for the short bureau against the wall, which displayed a few different designs of urn.

The funeral director was very cordial, skirting around the question of why I, a stranger to August Hollow, was visiting the home. When she asked what she could do for me, she did her best not to sound too probing.

I, in turn, did my best not to show my unease with the atmosphere. I told her I was drafting a report comparing fire danger in the city to the country and asked if the town had seen any fire-related deaths in recent years.

Her reaction was hard to decipher but no less polite. The condition for her cooperation was that I would leave real names out of my report and use pseudonyms where necessary, which I agreed to. She took her time sifting through the file cabinet beside her desk until, finally, she pulled out some papers. 

“Oh yes,” she said, holding her reading glasses up to her face. “Earlier this year, in fact. A couple in their early forties, lost to a house fire.” She shook her head, putting the file back where she’d found it. “They’d only just moved to town, too. Were busy putting it all together right up ‘til the end. Would have been settled in by then, only they’d insisted on doing it all themselves. Never quite understood that this community takes care of its own.”

She indulged my followup questions about the incident. To hear her talk about it, the blaze had been eminently preventable if they’d taken the proper precautions, but the couple had been stubborn and decided not to take the advice of the townsfolk. She then reassured me, as though I had a personal stake in the matter, that it wasn’t the worst way to go.

“That’s the thing about a burning building, you know. It’s not the fire that gets you in the end. It’s the smoke. Suffocation. The fire just… cleans you up.”

I thanked her for her time and reaffirmed my promise not to use any real names. My gaze lingered on the cremation urns until, finally, I took my leave.

When I got back to the bed and breakfast later that evening, Mr. Greene was sweeping the entryway. He paused long enough to give me a curt nod.

Making a concerted effort not to look at whatever he was sweeping up, I nodded back and climbed the stairs. I reminded myself I was only in town until the morning, and by the same time tomorrow I’d be back in my apartment, cuddling with my wife and our dog on the couch, far away from tight-knit country towns and urban legends.

On the third night, I woke up in hell.

A wicked light danced through the window, casting the room in vivid orange-red and stark shadows. I tore my headphones away and flew from the bed to the wall, half crouched beneath the sill, heart racing. I made to peek outside only to be near-blinded by the glare coming from the fields.

Where the small fire had been the night before, there was now an utter inferno, blazing skyward like a great and terrible tower, licking the sky well above my building’s two stories. It seemed to rage against the night itself, staving off the dark with its awful splendor, relentless and wild.

I watched it roil, transfixed, my fingers shaking against the sill. The eerie near-silence made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but if I listened close I could almost hear something. A keening, an animal wail, all but lost to the wind.

Without warning the fire flared, turning my vision white and startling me away from the window. I scrabbled backwards as best I could but my breath came short and shallow. My arms gave out as it all became too much to handle, and at some point, writhing and panting on the floor, I passed right out.

When I woke up, I was still on the floor.

I scrambled towards my things, grabbed the portable extinguisher and waved its nozzle around as a mobster might brandish a tommy gun.

But there was nothing to put out. There were no ravenous fires, no smoldering embers, no once-friendly townsfolk in masonic garb closing in with torches. Just a lovely view of tranquil farmland and the gentle light of dawn creeping in.

Bleary and ill-rested, I crept downstairs, nozzle at the ready, fire blanket over my shoulder, only to find Mr. Greene in the kitchen making eggs, bacon and toast. He simply sighed, shook his head and turned back to the stove.

Some half-conscious part of me thought he’d made quite a bit more than the two of us alone could eat, but I didn’t feel up to small talk. Instead I bit the bullet and asked directly about Effigy.

Mr. Greene told me to take a seat and wait. He set two plates down on the table across from each other, one with a reasonable helping of food and the other stacked higher than a funeral pyre, then settled into a chair.

I wasn’t sure if I was about to be prematurely cremated by a feral cape or put to the stake by a Pastor-style cape cult, but at that point I was too sleep-deprived to run. So instead, I sat across from him, and I waited.

My breakfast had all but gone cold when the front door swung open with a bang.

He was on the skinny side of slim, hunched forward like a hound on the prowl, wearing a pair of sturdy black overalls and nothing more. Dirt caked his bare feet. Thick bags under his eyes stained his sockets dark. His yellow teeth were bared, his pitch-black hair had grown shaggy and wild, and flames lit and gave out along his exposed skin like matches being struck and snuffed.

He stomped over to Mr. Greene and snatched a handful of bacon from his too-full plate, staring him down, silently daring him to put up a fight. He nabbed a piece of toast with his free hand and shoved it right into his mouth. The last bites burned black in his hand before he got to them, but he forced them down anyways.

Then he turned and his gaze caught on me, finally registering my presence.

I gripped the fire blanket to my chest on instinct, trying not to make any sudden moves.

The boy leered down at me, frowning, and made to take it from me. When I resisted he snarled and his flames flared, a brief burst of light and heat. The room filled with the acrid smell of burnt meat and the wooden floor received a new scorch mark. It was fearsome, or it would have been had I not become distracted by the agitation in his bloodshot eyes.

In that moment, it struck me that this guy was a  _ kid _ , lanky and awkward, sixteen at the oldest. His skin was splotched with acne and his chin had sprouted a meager crop of stubble. If I’d been standing, he’d have been a couple inches shorter than me.

His fires burned hot and fierce, but they didn’t produce a single wisp of smoke.

Taking advantage of my distraction, he tugged the blanket away from me. When it didn’t burn in his grip, he grinned, equal parts surprised and self-satisfied, and wandered out the way he’d come, shoveling extra-crispy bacon into his maw.

After a long, still moment, Mr. Greene cleared his throat and offered to explain.

Still reeling, I pulled out a tape recorder.

“There’s this thing about fire,” he began, “that anyone who works the earth ought to know. Before civilization, before agriculture, before human beings, fire was already part of the land’s natural cycle. Happened by chance, usually; hot weather in a dry climate, lightning hitting a tree, that sort of thing. But when it did happen, it often did more good for the vegetation than bad. Big logs, pine needles, all that stuff that takes forever to decompose? Fire gets at it and whoosh, those nutrients go right back into the soil. Insect infestations, plant diseases?” He snapped his fingers. “Gone. And just like that, life gets a chance to grow free again.

“Now, when the burning gets out of control, that’s when the bad starts to pile up. You get that most these days, people coming in, getting up to some foolery, starting the blaze that takes down a hundred acres. Sometimes, the land can’t recover so quick. Sometimes, the fire comes back to bite us.” He looked me dead in the eyes. “Sometimes it burns down a house with a couple and their kid still inside.”

He leaned back in his chair, staring down at the trail of dirt footprints. “He hasn’t stopped burning since then. It’s smaller when he’s calm, but when he gets worked up it just grows and grows. Has to eat and drink quick before it chars or boils. Sleeps where his home used to be, since it’s too burnt out to catch when he dreams. Wouldn’t be able to wear nothing if it weren’t for those overalls, being fireman’s wear. He doesn’t take charity, so we all find our ways to make it look like it isn’t.”

His hands came together as if to pray, only they were tilted towards me. “The trick to working with fire is this: You give it what it needs, you keep it from going wild, and you let it do its thing. Then one day, when everything’s had time to settle down?” He spread his hands. “The cycle can start again.”

He finished what was left of his plate soon after, leaving me alone at the table. I lost track of time sitting there, slowly digesting, my own plate untouched.

Later that day, as I was driving up the same freeway I’d come down on, I caught the sunset in my rear view mirror. It started out vivid, flushed with the sun’s last conniptions, but as I put the fields further and further behind me, the sky’s temper turned cool, and brazen red faded into a calm purple-blue.

When I finally got home, my wife met me with our dog in her arms and I met them both with a long embrace. She tried to apologize for worrying too much but I stopped her and told her the protective gear had been a big help. She spent the rest of the evening in a good mood, and when I grabbed a stepladder to triple-check all our smoke detectors, she didn’t ask any questions.


End file.
